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It’s here, it’s finally here! The first 1.0 release of Parole Media Player has finally arrived. This release greatly improves the user experience for users without hardware-accelerated video and includes several fixes.

What’s New?

Parole 0.9.x Developments

If you’ve been following along with the stable release channel, you have a lot of updates to catch up on. Here’s a quick recap. For everybody else, skip to the next header.

Parole 0.9.0 introduced a new mini mode, boosted X11 playback, and made the central logo clickable. When your playlist is complete, the “play” logo changes to a “replay” logo.

Parole 0.9.1 improved support for remote files and live stream playback. Older code was stripped away to make Parole even leaner and faster.

Parole 1.0.0: New Feature, Automatic Video Playback Output

We’ve finally resolved the long-standing “Could not initialise Xv output” error (Xfce #11950) that has plagued a number of our users, both in virtual machines and on real hardware.

In the past, we were delighted when we were able to implement the Clutter backend to solve this issue, but that API proved to be unstable and difficult to maintain between releases.

Now, we are using the “autoimagesink” for our newly defaulted “Automatic” video output option. This sink provides the best available sink (according to GStreamer) for the available environment, and should produce great results no matter the setup.

Xfce has been steadily heading towards it’s GTK+ 3 future with Xfce 4.14, but that doesn’t mean our current stable users have been left behind. We’ve got some new features, bug fixes, and translations for you!

What’s New?

New Features

Default monospace font option in the Appearance dialog

Improved support for embedded DisplayPort connectors on laptops

Show location of the mouse pointer on keypress (as seen in the featured image)

Activity is slowing down as the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin matures and heads toward the 0.4.0 stable release. With some usability refinements and bug fixes, users will find the latest release both easy and convenient to use.

Desktop Environment Support

MenuLibre is a FreeDesktop.org compliant menu editor for desktop environments implementing the Desktop Entry Specification. Some desktops are improperly configured and do not export the expected variables, and patches are included to infer the running environment in other ways. Some older desktops, such as IceWM, do not implement this specification and handle their menus in other ways.

MenuLibre has been tested with and known to work with the following desktop environments: Budgie, GNOME, KDE (Plasma), LXDE, LXQt (limited support, LXQt does not allow for non-alphabetical menu ordering), MATE, Pantheon, Unity, and Xfce. It is known not to work with IceWM and others that do not implement the Desktop Entry Specification.

If you come across an environment that should be supported but does not work as expected, let me know! It may require some additional patches to properly detect the environment and menu prefix.

Development Status

With this release, MenuLibre 2.1 is now in feature and string freeze for the 2.2.x series. I’m hoping for a stable 2.2.0 release sometime this month. This means two things.

Translators, now it’s your time to shine! There’s been quite a few changes in the past few releases and it looks like some localizations could use a bit of a refresh. Make your way over to the MenuLibre Translations page to get started or pick up where you left off.

Everyone else, take MenuLibre for a spin, and report bugs! If you are able to conclude that one of the existing bug reports has actually been resolved, leave a comment on the bug report so we can clean it off the list. Check out the MenuLibre Bugs page for more.

Window Identification Demo

Downloads

The latest version of MenuLibre can always be downloaded from the Launchpad archives. Grab version 2.1.5 from the below link. Debian Unstable and Ubuntu Bionic users should expect to see this latest version land in the archives sometime this week.

I’ve got some great news for fans of Catfish, the fast and powerful graphical search utility for Linux. The latest version, 1.4.4, has arrived with performance improvements and tons of localization updates!

With each new release, the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin becomes more refined and better suited for Xfce users. The latest release adds support for the MPRIS Playlists specification and improves support for Spotify and other media players.

What’s New?

New Feature: MPRIS Playlists Support

The 5 most recently played playlists are displayed (if supported by the player). Admittedly, I have not found a player that seems to implement the ordering portion of this specification.

New Feature: Experimental libwnck Support

libwnck is a window management library. This feature adds the “Raise” method for media players that do not support it, allowing the user to display the application window after clicking the menu item in the plugin.

Spotify for Linux is the only media player that I have found which does not implement this method. Since this is the media player I use most of the time, this was an important issue for me to resolve.

Development on the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin has been moving along at a steady pace, and the latest release marks the completion of another great feature for the Sound Indicator replacement applet.

What’s New?

New Feature: Multimedia Key Support

Multimedia keyboard support has been hit and miss in the Linux space for as long as there’s been multimedia keyboards. Support for these keys has been entirely dependent on support baked into each individual application. The best current example of this is the Spotify Linux client. Users can control the media player with various panel plugins, but not with their keyboards.

With the new multimedia key support in Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.3, the recently added MPRIS2 integration has been complemented with key bindings for the Play/Pause, Previous, Next, and Stop keys. When these keys are pressed, any actively running player known to the plugin will be notified, enabling keyboard playback control.

You can check out the new feature in the video below, where I very excitedly inundate my media players with playback commands.

General Improvements

Simplified device menus: The bold section headers have been replaced in favor of a single menu per input and output device. If there’s only one option available, the menu is no longer displayed.

Improved volume scale increments: The old defaults were steps of 6% and a max of 153%. These seemed a bit unusual, and have been replaced with a more sensible 5% and 150%.

This has been a comparatively quiet development cycle for Xubuntu. With increased development on Xfce as we prepare for Xfce 4.14, less Xubuntu-specific changes took place this cycle. Thankfully, there are still plenty of goodies to get excited about.

Appearance Updates: Greybird‘s client side decorations (CSD) have been refreshed and now consume much less space. elementary-xfce, our preferred icon theme, has been updated and includes new device, mimetype, and panel icons. And we have a fancy new wallpaper.

Application Updates: This is the first release of Xubuntu to feature GNOME Font Viewer, a handy tool for font management. LibreOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird have been updated to their latest versions (5.4, 56, and 52.4 respectively). On the Xfce side, Dictionary, Genmon Plugin, Mount Plugin, Exo, and Tumbler have been updated to take advantage of the latest GTK+ version and continue the march toward Xfce 4.14.

Screenshots

Download

Download Xubuntu 17.10 from Xubuntu.org. It’s available in both 32-bit and 64-bit varieties.

What’s Next?

After the release festivities calm down, work will begin on Xubuntu 18.04, our next LTS release. These are always our most active cycles as we polish the work that we’ve been doing the past 18 months and prepare for a 3-year support window. A few things we already have planned…

Replacing the Sound Indicator with the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin, a very capable replacement with more features landing soon.

Replacing the Xfce Indicator Plugin with the Xfce StatusNotifier Plugin, a fully compatible and better maintained plugin with a few new tricks.

A new release, some handy new features! But, I’ve never posted about this plugin before, so we’ll start with a proper introduction.

Xfce PulseAudio Panel Plugin

This is a plugin for the Xfce panel that allows the user to easily adjust the audio volume of the PulseAudio sound system. As of the 0.3.0 release, this plugin was extended with support for controlling multimedia players via the MPRIS DBUS interface. And with this latest release, users can now easily toggle the default audio input and output devices.

Features

Control device volume, from 0% to 100% and beyond

Instantly mute volumes by middle-clicking the plugin or clicking the mute toggle

Launch the configured audio mixer

Open, raise, or control playback from known media players (since 0.3.0)

Select default input and output devices (since 0.3.1)

Screenshots

Downloads

The latest version of Xfce PulseAudio Plugin can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 0.3.1 from the below link.